Derrick, although your enthusiasm for this "leap" is inspired by something worth it, most of the unsupportive comments have their points.
Unfortunately,that alone kills the practical value of your proposition. There obviously are valid reasons for not buying a copy of Jaguar now, period.

I think we would all agree that Jaguar is an awesome OS and definitely worth more than $130, before we factor in other issues. But when the question becomes "why not upgrade now?" there is no shortage for answers, and even our huge sympathy for Apple won't make 'em go away.

I'm a Mac fan, perhaps even a fanatic. But then, I guess I'm not young enough to be blinded by fanatism. I've had OSX on a partition from day one with no use for it (well, it was quite useless and even annoying in the beginning). I kept it up to date by paying but still could find no use for it. I have a feeling 10.2 is a release that I could finally use, but I no longer want to pay before making sure. $130 is not much for a "real release" of MacOS X, but it's quite a chunk if it'll keep sitting in a partition and I don't see any creativity in that.

I can see why a Windoze convert or unix geek would be so crazy for X, but MacOS 9 has never been something to run away from for me (and it wasn't for any Mac user until the advent of X. Suddenly 9 is a horrible system to run?). Yes it occasionally crashes while running Explorer, but not while I'm retouching 130 + Mb image files and FTPing stuff at the same time (I'm a freelance photographer).

Now I sure would still love to have multi tasking and protected memory. I love X's built in PDF capabilities and it's gorgeous eye-candy (although I'm not sure which is better: eye candy or full stereo sound effects for interaction). I totally beleive in the power and future of X.

Today, 10.1.5 not only feels but also is sluggish on a G4 400 (and anyone who claims otherwise is full of it), does not run the software I already have natively, is not as intuitive and easily accessible as 9, is missing many essential features (like displaying the number of items in a folder, or revealing the original of an alias, etc.)

As that reveals, the promise of 10.2 is quite irrelevant to my expectations. As a matter of fact I couldn't care less about GCC3.1, CUPS, PPTP,LDAP, and BLAH and BLAH and BLAH even though I'm sure those are great things and am glad to hear they're available if needed. Thus, unless I see 10.2 running as lively as 9.2 on a comparable machine it will be hard to justify spending for it AGAIN.

There probably is a lot of freelancers in my position, for whom it will not make sense to leap anywhere until new machine and software purchases are due.